The upcoming PS3 release of “White Album” has introduced a rare innovation to the visual novel genre in the form of the game’s “motion portrait” system, which can be seen in action below.

Whilst at first glance this might appear to be another forgettable console adventure game, it actually includes a rather impressive graphical innovation (for a visual novel) in the form of animated characters:

Whether eroge and visual novel publishers follow suit remains to be seen, although considering that even after decades of publishing the same simple format they still release occasional bugfests, the chances do not seem good.

Love is beautiful, I regret from the depth of my soul the fact that I never had the opportunity to live similar experiences like in games as this.
Seeing what I missed makes me realize that this will be a void that will be accompany me for the rest of my life.
If you have the opportunity, seek love in a real person. A waifu is a one-sided love that will never give you real love.

What exactly is so innovating about this? There's plenty of visual novels games/parts in games that use animated characters. Obviously this looks better than most still looks too much like flash animated stuff in my opinion.

Hmm, to be honest it doesn't look all that innovative to me. I've seen other visual novels use animated characters in 2D during dialogues - one is an eroge named Momoiro Paradise. Well maybe not as smooth in framerate, but almost more like watching TV Anime.